Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has been around since the early 1990's and provides a technique for imaging into samples, such as small animals, eyes, tissue, glass and the like. Recent advances have increased the imaging speed, which may allow relatively large image sets (such as 3-D volumes) to be quickly generated. Since OCT is high-speed, generally non-contact and non-destructive, it is well suited for imaging dynamics over short time scales, for example, well below 1 second (the beating of a heart tube in a fruit fly) all the way up to changes over a long time scales, for example, days or even longer (tissue growing).
OCT imaging systems are typically divided into several subsystems including an optical engine, a processing unit and a scanning system. The scanning system may provide the interface to the sample that is being imaged. Interfaces to date include attachments to stereo zoom microscopes and table mounted systems for retinal imaging. One retinal imaging interface, for example, Carl Zeiss Meditec's StratusOCT™, looks much like a fundus camera. This interface has a chin rest for the patient and a mechanism for aligning the patient with the OCT imaging system. This system typically requires a mobile, upright, and cooperative patient in order to obtain usable OCT images.